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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

作者:

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization

Personalizing large language models requires adapting model behavior to individual users while preserving robustness and deployment-scale efficiency. Existing approaches typically personalize LLMs either at the input level, by retrieving user histories or constructing profile prompts, or at the parameter level, by maintaining user-specific parameter-efficient modules. The former makes personalization sensitive to retrieval quality and prompt design, whereas the latter incurs storage and maintenance costs that grow with the user population. To address these limitations, we propose TAP-PER (Temporal Attentive Prefix for PERsonalization), a prefix-based framework that encodes user preferences as learnable representations, eliminating explicit prompt construction and replacing heavy per-user adapters with lightweight user-state prefix embeddings. Inspired by personalized recommendation systems, TAP-PER decomposes user modeling into user-state and query-conditioned components, and incorporates temporal signals to capture the evolving nature of user interests. Experiments on six LaMP tasks show that TAP-PER consistently outperforms prompt-based and model-based baselines across classification, rating, and generation settings. Moreover, TAP-PER uses 130x fewer per-user parameters than OPPU and roughly half the total parameter footprint of PER-PCS at the 1,000-user scale, demonstrating that scalable LLM personalization can be achieved without explicit prompt construction or heavy per-user adapters.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages

AudioLLMs enable speech recognition conditioned on textual prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual benchmark of natural speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

An Electric Potential-Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Physics-Guided Image Reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography

While deep learning has significantly advanced image reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), most data-driven methods map directly between capacitance and permittivity distribution, treating the sensor as a black box. This overlooks the electric potential field – the fundamental physical link governing the nonlinear and ill-posed ``soft-field'' effect. To address this, we propose an electric potential-augmented ECT benchmark dataset designed to explicitly integrate latent physics behind ECT into the learning process. Generated via a COMSOL-MATLAB pipeline for an eight-electrode sensor as an example, the dataset comprises 20,000 randomized samples across four typical flow patterns. Crucially, alongside the conventional capacitance vectors and permittivity distributions depicted as images, each sample preserves eight excitation-wise full-field potential maps. Beyond data release, we provide illustrative evaluation protocols for both forward and inverse problems of ECT. Through comprehensive testing on both in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, we systematically demonstrate how the inclusion of electric potential maps enhances modeling accuracy and robustness. Fundamentally, the explicit inclusion of latent field information significantly lowers the barrier to integrating physical laws into ECT modeling, thereby establishing a standardized foundation for future physics-guided machine learning of ECT image reconstruction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

作者:

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MAF: Multimodal Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Sentiment Analysis with MLLMs

作者:

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex multimodal content. However, their performance in sentiment analysis exhibits acute sensitivity to prompt design, rendering static, uniformly applied prompts inherently suboptimal for capturing the nuanced multimodal cues that vary across inputs. To address this limitation, we propose a Multimodal Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (MAF) framework, which dynamically retrieves and integrates query-relevant demonstrations to elicit the sentiment reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in a context-sensitive manner. MAF constructs a demonstration retrieval module that holistically encodes facial expressions, scene context, and textual semantics, with a lip movement amplitude detection mechanism introduced for accurate speaker identification in multi-person scenarios. Departing from conventional fixed-weight fusion, a lightweight coefficient generation network is trained to output query-conditioned fusion weights in real time, enabling weighted aggregation of multimodal similarity scores to retrieve the top-K most informative demonstrations. Prediction stability is further enhanced through majority voting over multiple candidate outputs generated by the MLLM. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAF achieves substantial and consistent performance improvements over the corresponding backbone variants and remains competitive with strong multimodal sentiment-analysis baselines.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

作者:

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ControlMap: Controllable High-Definition Map Generation for Traffic Scenario Simulation

arXiv:2606.15930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Dimension-Free Approximate Tensorization of Quantum Hypercontractivity for Qudit Depolarizing Semigroups

arXiv:2606.17729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove almost tensorization for hypercontractivity and logarithmic-Sobolev constants for a class of reversible quantum Markov semigroups satisfying the positive off-diagonal scaling (PODS) property. This class includes qubit examples and generalized depolarizing semigroups with respect to full-rank states in arbitrary finite dimensions. For any such semigroup $(\Phi_t)_{t\ge 0}$ and every tensor power $n$, we show that the log-Sobolev constant of the product semigroup $\Phi_t^{\otimes n}$ is at least $2/(3\ln 2)$, approximately 0.96, times the log-Sobolev constant of the single-site semigroup $\Phi_t$, independently of $n$ and the local dimension $d$. The proof first establishes exact tensorization of the $(q,2)$-hypercontractive inequality for integer $q$, in particular $q=3$, and then extends the estimate to all real $q>2$ by complex interpolation; the standard implication from hypercontractivity to logarithmic-Sobolev inequalities yields the stated almost tensorization result. As an application of the same method, we also obtain sharp $(q,2)$-hypercontractivity estimates for qubit depolarizing channels.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Perturbative Input-Output Theory of Floquet Cavity Magnonics and Magnon Energy Shifts

arXiv:2512.12103v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative input-output formalism to compute the reflectance and transmittance spectra of cavity magnonics systems subject to a Floquet modulation. The method exploits the strong hierarchy between the magnetic-dipole couplings transverse (drive field) and parallel (modulation field) to the static bias field, which naturally introduces the small parameter $\epsilon = (2Ns)^{-1/2}$ associated with the total spin $Ns$ of the ferromagnet. By organizing the cavity and magnon fields in a systematic expansion in $\epsilon$, we obtain compact analytic expressions for the spectra up to second order. Using these results, we reproduce the characteristic sideband structure observed in recent Floquet cavity electromagnonics experiments. Furthermore, accounting for the Zeeman interaction between the modulation field and the fully polarized ground state - a contribution typically neglected in previous treatments - we predict an additional magnon detuning of approximately $0.8\,\mathrm{GHz}$, independent of both modulation frequency and sample size and determined solely by the spatial volume occupied by the modulation field. This identifies a measurable and previously overlooked shift relevant for the interpretation and design of cavity magnonics experiments.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

HAARES Half-Split Residual Basis Routing for Deep Transformers

作者:

arXiv:2606.06564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block-level residual routing makes learned residual aggregation practical by routing over block summaries, but each summary compresses an ordered sequence of attention and MLP updates into one cumulative vector. We propose \method{}, a lightweight residual basis router that keeps the cumulative block source and adds one half-split detail basis, computed as the difference between first-half and second-half residual updates. The detail basis is RMS-matched and updated online, exposing coarse intra-block trajectory information without dense sublayer-level routing. Across OpenWebText, cross-domain character-level benchmarks, and BPE-tokenized OpenWebText, the empirical pattern is depth-dependent: gains are small or mixed at shallow depth and most reliable in 48-layer models. In the 201M 48-layer setting, \method{} improves over Block AttnRes across all three seeds, while a 453M two-seed probe shows the same direction. Ablations rule out source duplication, random signed details, fixed detail-source biases, or block-count changes alone. Cost analysis shows that the method is FLOP-light but not wall-clock-free: it adds memory and routing overhead, yet its relative arithmetic cost is amortized as width grows and earlier convergence can reduce time-to-target.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.